Views from the Edge

An Isa Genzken retrospective.

Do you know the art of Isa Genzken, the subject of a dazzling retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art? Or have you, like me, been only spottily aware of the work of this mercurial German artist? Genzken, now sixty-five, is a sculptor whose sporadic output, abrupt stylistic changes, and personal vagaries have kept her at the margins of art-world notice, until now. The show finds coherence in works that range from minimalist sculpture, charged with cryptic emotions, from the nineteen-seventies, to recent hilarious assemblages, featuring plastic toys and gussied-up mannequins, which secrete a steely aesthetic discipline. Unifying it all is a brash spirit that is strangely both celebratory and bedevilled. Genzken takes on the ideals of modern art and architecture along with the joys and the anxieties of life in contemporary cities. The show rejiggers recent art history; in particular, Genzken emerges as the chief inceptor of a trend in sculpture that has been termed Unmonumental, from the title of the New Museum show that introduced it, in 2007. The work employs vernacular materials, pop-cultural allusions, and seemingly slapdash procedures to mock—while also exploiting—the passive-aggressive obduracy of classic minimalism.

Genzken’s lack of fame owes much to a difficult life. Der Spiegel recently reported that she has struggled with alcoholism and other troubles, and she bears scars of German history. She was born in 1948 in a town near Hamburg, “the only child of two art freaks,” she has said. Her father was a medical student who longed to be an opera singer; her mother trained to be an actress but became a technical assistant at a pharmaceutical company. Genzken’s childhood was culturally enriched but, as she has told it, far from happy. A photograph in the MOMA show, blown up to poster size, shows Genzken as a small girl, weeping in her mother’s arms. In 1960, the family moved to West Berlin, where Isaâs paternal grandfather, Karl Genzken, had lived*. A doctor and a committed Nazi, he was the head of the medical office of the S.S. and oversaw experiments on concentration-camp inmates; he was convicted of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg, and died in 1957, three years after being released from prison. According to Der Spiegel, the artist “hinted to” a friend about a childhood visit to her grandfather in prison, where she saw an open umbrella in his cell. Whether that relates to the frequent use of umbrellas in her work seems moot. It’s like Genzken to tantalize with inklings of particular import, which slip away when you try to parse them.

Nevertheless, she was creative and gamely independent from early on. She studied film and acted in high school, and learned photography at a design college. The MOMA show includes many wonderfully fresh photographs of buildings and crowds in New York, a city Genzken has loved since her first visit, in 1960. In 1969, she took the entrance exam to the University of Fine Arts, in Hamburg, for which she was handed a sheet of paper, drawing tools, and scissors, to show what she could do. She crumpled the paper and threw it on the table. Her temerity either impressed or didn’t dissuade the admissions committee, which accepted her.

Piquantly attractive, she took odd jobs as a fashion model, for money and the opportunity to travel. In 1972, her boyfriend, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, who soon became a leading art historian and critic, encouraged her to apply to the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where his friend Gerhard Richter was teaching. There she absorbed influences of American minimalist and conceptual art, in particular the phenomenological aesthetics of Bruce Nauman. (She had an epiphany about the nature of space, she has said, while performing an exercise conceived by Nauman: lie on the floor for half an hour and imagine sinking into it.) She was also inspired by Russian Constructivism, especially the graphics and the architectural schemes of El Lissitzky. In 1982, she and Richter married.

Genzken knew Andreas Baader, of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang, who had been a schoolmate of Buchloh’s. It seems that she influenced Richter to make his suite of paintings “October 18, 1977” (1988), about the deaths in prison of Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, and two other gang members. Genzken and Richter’s marriage—they divorced in 1993—was marked by obsessive discussion of German political turmoil. During those years, she created a series of works by prevailing on “a very nice doctor,” she has said, who “was drinking, like me,” to take X-rays of her head as she drank, smoked, and laughed. Even in distress, she could muster a rigorous focus on her art.

Genzken’s first mature works, starting in 1974, are slender, gently curved forms in painted wood, oval in cross-section, and as long as twenty feet. Made with the help of a physics student, using a computer program, and a craftsman, they are paeans to precision, as is Genzken’s one readymade sculpture, from 1982, which is a touchstone in the show: a handsome multiband radio. Fascinated by high-tech audio gear, Genzken said that “sculpture must be at least as modern.” Later, she rendered radios in concrete, with metal antennae.

Throughout the eighties, she fashioned plaster and concrete sculptures resembling the walls and the recesses of ruined buildings, surely invoking memories of bomb devastation in Hamburg and Berlin. The pieces are little more than two or three feet high, but in the show, mounted at eye level on welded-steel tables, they loom. They are some of the most melancholy things I have ever seen. And yet, after prolonged viewing, every crack, dent, and crumbling texture seems specific and intended, as if destruction could be inflicted with finesse. The same sense of exactitude in disorder attends Genzken’s shift, in the nineties, to wild-looking assemblages.

Until 2005, when Genzken joined the David Zwirner gallery, her most substantial New York show was “Fuck the Bauhaus (New Buildings for New York),” at an artist-run space, AC Project Room, in 2000. That exhibition, most of which has been reconfigured at MOMA, consisted of architectural models made of refuse—including pizza boxes and oyster shells—and of colored sheets of Plexiglas, swatches of fabric, and toy cars. Spiced by gossip about the artist’s fecklessness, which, on an earlier visit to the city, had caused her to be ousted from a series of hotels, starting at the Waldorf and ending in a youth hostel, the show is legendary; Laura Hoptman, a curator of the moma show, told me that art-world types who didn’t see it (including me) are tempted to pretend, or may even believe, that they did. At first glance, the work appears frivolous. A small, motorized, hula-dancing doll gyrates next to one pedestal. But, again, look long. The flimsy maquettes, barely held together with tape, conjure deep as well as farcical thoughts about architecture’s history and its potential. A red Plexiglas tower draped with a rainbow plastic Slinky suggests a skyscraper wearing its wiring on the outside. A propeller on top of another tower expresses its upward aspiration. What might we build if, at a whim, we could build anything? Getting to the point of taking Genzken seriously requires an effort of trust, but the payoff is exhilarating. It wasn’t lost on young New York artists, including Rachel Harrison, the current star of Unmonumental sculpture. “Fuck the Bauhaus” proved to be the starter’s gun for a movement.

Genzken’s inspirations since the eighties have swung between the techno-music scene in Berlin—as with dangling clusters of kitchen utensils, splashed with pink spray paint, entitled “Gay Babies” (1997)—and traumatic world events. War comes and goes as a theme, most explicitly in “Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death” (2003), a group of chaotic assemblages—toy soldiers, photographs, household objects, fabrics, foil, mirrors, splurges of paint—made in response both to 9/11, which she witnessed firsthand, on a visit to New York, and to the Iraq war. Unusually, for Genzken, it feels out of artistic control. I suspect a conflict between her antiwar sentiment and her long identification with the energies of American culture. The effect is less expressive than purgative, but “The American Room” (2003-04) is fully grounded. An executive desk, topped by a sculpture of Scrooge McDuck, is flanked with American eagles, artificial flowers, various bric-a-brac, and other signs of prideful complacency. The work’s critical bite is softened by unmistakable tones of amusement and relish. Also, it’s gorgeous.

Genzken reconsidered 9/11 in “Ground Zero” (2008), a fanciful non-entry in a contest for proposed building designs for the site. Jerry-built structures of shiny, cheap materials, on wheeled plinths—a memorial tower, a church, a hospital, a disco, a car park, and a fashion store, with a twisted metal tower of glowing light fixtures thrown in—suggest wreckage sprung to life. The spirit of the work is a kind of anguished buoyancy, optimistic against steep odds. Genzken erases the distinction that T. S. Eliot thought must be strictly maintained between “the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” It may be hard, at first, to believe that you are in good hands with this unquiet soul. But put it to a test. You’ll see. ♦

*The family did not live in the villa of Karl Genzken, as previously stated.

Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic.